Paleoecology Blogs

The advantages of taking a chance with a new journal – OpenQuaternary

Full disclosure: I’m on the editorial board of Open Quaternary and also manage the blog, but I am not an Editor in Chief and have attempted to ensure that my role as an author and my role as an editor did not conflict.

There are lots of thoughts about where to submit journal articles. Nature’s Research Highlights has a nice summary about a new article in PLoS One (Salinas and Munch, 2015) that looks to identify optimum journals for submission, and Dynamic Ecology discussed the point back in 2013, a post that drew considerable attention (here, here, and here, among others). When we thought about where to submit I made the conscious choice to choose an Open Source journal. I chose Open Quaternary partly because I’m on the editorial board, but also because I believe that domain specific journals are still a critical part of the publishing landscape, and because I believe in Open Access publishing.

The downside of this decision was that (1) the journal is new, so there’s a risk that people don’t know about it, and it’s less ‘discoverable’; (2) even though it’s supported by an established publishing house (Ubiquity Press) it will not obtain an impact factor until it’s relatively well established. Although it’s important to argue that impact factors should not make a difference, it’s hard not to believe that they do make a difference.

Figure 2. When code looks crummy it’s not usable. This has since been fixed.

That said, I’m willing to invest in my future and the future of the discipline (hopefully!), and we’ve already seen a clear advantage of investing in Open Quaternary. During the revision of our proofs we noticed that the journal’s two column format wasn’t well suited the the blocks of code that we presented to illustrate examples in our paper. We also lost the nice color syntax highlighting that pandoc offers when it renders RMarkdown documents (see examples in our paper’s markdown file). With the help of the journal’s Publishing Assistant Paige MacKay, Editor in Chief Victoria Herridge and my co-authors we were able to get the journal to publish the article in a single column format, with syntax highlighting supported using highlight.js.

I may not have a paper in Nature, Science or Cell (the other obvious option for this paper /s) but by contributing to the early stages of a new open access publishing platform I was able to change the standards and make future contributions more readable and make sure that my own paper is accessible, readable and that the technical solution we present is easily implemented.

I think that’s a win. The first issue of Open Quaternary should be out in March, until then you can check out our GitHub repository or the PDF as submitted (compleate with typoes).